Welcoming the Messenger

2nd Sunday of Advent C
Luke 3:1-6

On the far side of the sun a spaceship is traveling on its way to enter the Mercury orbit. On August 3, 2004 NASA launched the Messenger spacecraft which will swing around the Earth, Venus, the sun and to Mercury to study the planet closest to the sun. It has heat shields to protect it from the immense heat, sometimes 840degrees, and is set to send photographs of the entire surface of Mercury, to investigate if there are polar caps of ice on the planet, and to investigate why Mercury is so very dense. Of course, at the heart of this is always the question, how did we get here and how did this world happen?

There is a Messenger in the wilderness.

John the Baptist was also a messenger in the wilderness. Born the surprise child late in life for Elizabeth and Zechariah and supposedly the cousin of Jesus, he led a lonely life in the desert. He dressed in animal skins, he ate only wild food. He knew the desert was a place to meet God, a place without home or security or comfort but a place where the people of Israel had always found God. He returned to the communities around the Jordan river to preach the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He did baptisms – not dainty ones like we do, but full body immersion, which signifies the person’s death to the old life and rising to the new. He preached repentance, which means to turn around. He spoke as one who had seen something that is not always seen; heard that which is usually drowned out in our lives. He called to people to turn away from what they were focused on and to turn to God. His word was a preparation for the Word, the one who came after him, Jesus.

We have messengers in the wilderness in our lives, people who live in wild places, who know things we don’t know. There are homeless people in our community who something about the wilderness in the middle of our streets. There are youth who are longing for love who know something of what it means to not be at home. There are people around us who have suffered and have seen things we would not want to see. There are faces that look at us through the photographs in the newspaper and on TV that have something to tell us about our lives. Turn, they say. Turn. When some of the people of our world are not safe, fed, or home, there is cause for our attention. Turn.

Sometimes we are the ones in the wilderness. A serious illness, divorce, loss of a job, a tragedy in our lives, depression, or just the years of wondering what it is all for can put us into the wilderness. And sometimes there we find that we have turned, we have discovered a different view of things, we realize that the landscape needs to be changed, and that God is working in a way we did not expect.

How do we welcome the messenger?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another messenger from the wilderness of a WWII concentration camp, invites us as Christians to listen to the messengers in our lives. In his book, Life Together, he writes:

"The first service that one owes to others in community consists in listening to them. Just as love for God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives His Word but also lends us His ear ... Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and, in the end, there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words."

In the 1970s NASA couldn’t figure out how to get a spacecraft to orbit Mercury. There was a problem of needing too much fuel to get to the right place. In the 80s they figured out how to use a gravitational assist, and that is how the Messenger is getting into its correct position. It will swing near the Earth, Venus, and Mercury and each time the gravitational pull of the planet will alter the course of the spacecraft a bit, turning it to its correct place.

When we listen to the messengers in the wilderness we let them pull us, we let them turn us. We let ourselves be pulled by the gravity of something larger than we are, and then we are set more accurately on the right course.

The Messenger spacecraft will not survive. It will eventually crash into the fiery surface of Mercury. John the Baptist did not survive his return from the wilderness – Herod had him arrested shortly after these events, and then beheaded. Many of the messengers in the wilderness do not survive their sojourn there – it is a dangerous place. But John’s words still speak to us these thousands of years later. Prepare the way. God is coming. Turn toward God. All flesh shall see the salvation of God.